Crimes Against Innocence

  On the evening of March 26, 2003, seven-year-old Dalton Alexander Mesarchik waited for a ride to Bible study. He was supposed to leave his family’s home in Streator, Illinois, in a church van. The van never came. By the following morning, hundreds of people were searching for him. Before noon, a fisherman found Dalton’s body in the Vermilion River south of Streator. He had been killed by blunt-force trauma to the head. More than 23 years later, no one has been arrested for his abduction and murder. Dalton’s case is haunting not only because of his age, but because of the narrow window in which he vanished. One moment, he was waiting in the enclosed porch of his own home. Roughly half an hour later, his family realized he was gone. There was no reported commotion, no confirmed eyewitness to an abduction and no public description of the person who took him. What remains is a case filled with physical evidence, thousands of leads, years of rumors and one unanswered question: Who kil...